Viscera Waltz in 38 Time
by pyrebi
Summary: It's one of those things you get used to, in this business, and knowing how a man looks on the inside sure takes the mystery away. A character study of Dean in bodies and blood.


**WARNING** - This fic contains graphic descriptions of injury and death. If that's going to bother you, PLEASE don't continue reading. (There are no didn't-already-happen-in-canon character deaths, though. Promise.)

This fic is written in seven drabbles of exactly 100 words each. I do hope you enjoy.

* * *

**Viscera Waltz in 3/8 Time**

**

* * *

**

"Fuck. _Jesus_," Dad hisses, throwing an arm across the doorway like that's gonna stop Dean from seeing what's on the other side. What used to be a man lies in a tangled mess of skin and blood and intestine, sticking to the bargain-basement carpet. Slow-buzzing flies cut through air that tastes thick and foul.

Dad cough-retches a little but Dean just stares transfixed. The carpet has absorbed most of the liquid, leaving the organs listless atop a dark tacky stain. The heart's missing, of course, but Dean recognizes most everything else from science-book drawings.

He's seven. It's his first body.

* * *

He pulls back Dad's bandages and panics. Pieces of skin and pus come away with the gauze, and the stink of infection fills the room. He can see the wounds weeping, cobwebbed with blood vessels. Dad doesn't wake up. He doesn't know what to do. He calls 911 like TV said to.

Eight days later Dad spirits them out of foster care. Sammy cries for the Alpha-Bits and the cartoons and the Star Wars sheets on a bed he was told was _his_. Dad looks pale and weak and in pain. Dean's torn.

He's nine, and his dad's not invincible.

* * *

Dad coldcocks him and it's not until his ass has been on the ground for a couple minutes that he realizes why. The wendigo nearby doesn't look much like a wendigo anymore, seeing how more of its brain is flecking his shirt than resting in what's left of its head. He ruined one of Dad's good shotguns bashing it in, the steady _thump_ of stock against flesh giving way in shatters and splinters to the heavy wet sound of grey matter forced out of a skull.

He's seventeen and he just failed to save a girl from becoming a meal.

* * *

The heat is intense, and some dark part of him makes him look up briefly. In the orange-bright light he sees yellow hair sputter into black ash, watches skin already split open darken and peel back and crack, letting flame lick into innards which somehow remain as firmly pinned inside the body as the body is pinned to the ceiling.

And then his concentration is broken, and he looks away from the woman turning angry red and black on the ceiling. He takes his brother and he runs.

He is four. He is twenty-six. Nothing will ever be the same.

* * *

He's watched Sam mauled by ghosts, shredded by beasts. He's seen the skin peeled back from the kid's muscles, he's patched up deep, oozing punctures. Sam is resilient. Little bitch may not be able to fight worth a damn, but god he can bounce back.

So for a long time after Sam stops moving, starts growing cool, all Dean can do is look at the single wound. It's not even that bad. It closed in on itself the minute Jake pulled the knife out and ran.

He just. He can't even comprehend.

He's twenty-eight, and this is the turning point.

* * *

He's split open throat to dick, and Alistair is poking through his guts like he's a fetal pig in a biology lab. Alistair selects a prize—his liver—and yanks until it's free in his hand, a dark, wet mass, looking private and alien. He bites a chunk off, turning it around in his mouth before plucking it out and putting it in Dean's own.

"_Swallow_," he says.

When he tries, Alistair pinches his esophagus shut, and he chokes on the iron taste of his own organ. Alistair laughs.

He's twenty-nine (_thirty-nine, forty-nine, fifty-nine_), and he thinks he's losing himself.

* * *

(_Remember what I said._

"And Sam?"

Michael had smiled, wearing Dad's face in that dream too. _Oh, I can try. Better than you'll get from the other side_.)

Dean finds himself suddenly unpossessed in the middle of a leveled suburb, the stink of burning flesh and the ozone smell of dead demons all around him. The man closest to him has been torn in half, legs yards away from torso.

Across the street, a body uncurls tentatively, recoils from a severed hand, and looks around.

"..._Dean_?" Sam sounds so incredulous.

He's thirty-two, and the world shudders and restarts for him.


End file.
